Researchers have identified neural biomarkers associated with food
and drug cravings. The findings could help pave the way for new
treatments for addiction.
Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven is a Sumerian poem relating the event, now famous from The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the goddess Inanna/Ishtar sends the celestial bull to attack Gilgamesh after he has rejected her advances. The epic changes several details from the original poem which ends with praise for Inanna instead of Enkidu’s condemnation.
Map of especially metal-poor giant stars identified from Gaia DR3 data
that shows, as a concentrated region (marked with a circke), the stars
of the “poor old heart” of the Milky Way galaxy. The map shows the whole
of the night sky in the same way that certain maps of the world show
Earth’s surface. In the center of the map is the direction towards the
center of our home galaxy. Credit: H.-W. Rix / MPIA
A group of MPIA astronomers has managed to identify the “poor old
heart of the Milky Way"—a population of stars left over from the
earliest history of our home galaxy, which resides in our galaxy’s core
regions.
For this feat of “galactic archaeology,” the
researchers analyzed data from the most recent release of ESA’s Gaia
Mission, using a neural network to extract metallicities for two million
bright giant stars in the inner region of our galaxy. The detection of
these stars, but also their observed properties, provides welcome
corroboration for cosmological simulations of the earliest history of
our home galaxy.
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, gradually formed over nearly the
entire history of the universe, which spans 13 billion years. Over the
past decades, astronomers have managed to reconstruct different epochs
of galactic history in the same way that archaeologists would
reconstruct the history of a city: Some buildings come with explicit
dates of construction.
For others, the use of more primitive building materials or older
building styles implies that they have come before, as does the
situation where remnants are found underneath other (and thus newer)
structures. Last but not least, spatial patterns are important—for many
cities, there will be a central old town surrounded by districts that
are clearly newer.
For galaxies, and in particular for our home galaxy, cosmic
archaeology proceeds along very similar lines. The basic building blocks
of a galaxy are its stars. For a small subset of stars, astronomers can
deduce precisely how old they are. For example, this is true for
so-called sub-giants, a brief phase of stellar evolution where a star’s
brightness and temperature can be used to deduce its age. …
On Dec.18, 2022, InSight did not respond to communications from
Earth. As expected, the lander’s power has been declining for months,
and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. NASA
will declare the mission over when InSight misses two consecutive
communication sessions with the spacecraft orbiting Mars, part of
the Mars Relay Network – but only if the cause of the missed
communication is the lander itself. After that, NASA’s Deep Space
Network will listen for a time, just in case.
InSight launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May
5, 2018. After a six-month cruise, InSight landed on Mars on Nov. 26,
2018, and immediately began surface operations at Elysium Planitia,
but science data collection didn’t start fully until about 10 weeks
after landing. That’s because InSight’s science goals and instruments
are very different from other Mars landers or rovers. In some ways,
InSight’s science activities were designed to be more like a marathon
than a sprint. Over the past four years, the lander data has yielded
details about Mars’ interior layers, its liquid core, the surprisingly
variable remnants beneath the surface of its mostly extinct magnetic
field, weather on this part of Mars, and lots of quake activity.
